Junie Jameson, Snoopy Reporter's Secret Structure

  The origins of Junie Jamieson's story aren't hard to figure out if you know anything about mainstream bondage imagery. WAAAAAY before there was porn, guys were getting very into Lois Lane's habit of constantly getting tied to chairs (mostly) by gangsters, necessitating her rescue by Superman, in both the comics and the ancient TV series.

The snoopy reporter who has to get put on ice is a very old trope and if I wanted to use it, I had to figure out ways to make it new. It was easy, though. I just updated it to modern times, and had some fun with the trope while I was at it. 

For example, snoopy reporters in the old days were just tied to chairs because that's what you did with snoopy reporters. You certainly didn't shoot them! But I had the gangsters in my story all ready to kill Junie out of hand for eavesdropping on them. The only reason she gets tied to a chair is that a gangster who's doing a little background investigating on her via a laptop discovers her blog and when he tells the boss she's a socialist atheist progressive -- in other words, a looney lefty -- the crime boss decides that killing her is not necessary because no one with any power is apt to give any credibility to her at all. No one will believe her, in short. Especially since her only publication outlet is her blog, which is, as the gangster describes it, "read only by three cows in a cornfield."

Yes, tropes are fun. Also, in the comics and TV shows and the old movies, the snoopy reporter is always rescued/escapes before the Worst can happen. Well, not in my story. The worst happens, and it happens a LOT before she gets away. I mean, a lot a lot. What's more, she ... kinda likes it. A lot.

But that's not where the fun ends. The no-good that the crime boss is up to involves an operation in which he uses a bunch of phony consultants to absorb every penny of the tax money that has been designated to build a network of bike paths in Century City. All the money goes into "consultants" who write papers, but not a foot of bike path ever gets built.

It might seem outrageous, but of course it's not: it's already being done, and on a much grander scale than my dinky urban bike path scam. California has a high-speed bullet train project from LA to San Francisco  that has absorbed $10 billion in taxpayer money, and practically nothing has been, um ... built. All the money has gone to consultants. California even hired consultants to oversee the consultants, then commissioned a study on why nothing was happening, one conclusion of which was, California needed to stop hiring consultants to watch consultants ("who might not have the best interests of the state in mind") and hire people who worked directly for the state instead.

Ya don't say, Einstein?

The whole thing is so outrageous that it makes my crime boss' bike path scheme seem penny-ante, though the crime boss thinks he's hot stuff. As he says, "I didn't get to be the crime lord of Century City by actually building stuff when I'm paid to build stuff!"

Yes, writing has its pleasures.

Cover Art and Inspirational Art For "Captured By Gangsters"

 “Junie Jamieson, Snoopy Reporter” was initially planned to be a novelette, somewhere between 8,000 and 12,000 words, first draft written in about a week and published within seven days. It was initially inspired by an image, this image:

Credit: House of Gord

(There were also a number of images of women in bitchsuits that were relevant like this one

but I rejected them outright as cover art because it might make readers think the story was all about pet play, and it's not.)

The story turned out to be a novel, and the image didn't make it to the cover, first of all because I didn’t have copyright to it, and even if I DID have copyright to it, I couldn’t use it as is because it has naughty bits visible. I didn’t try to work out a Second Life version that would be acceptable because I didn’t think Second Life could do it justice even without the nudity issue. Wenona is the model in the pic, and the way her legs are spread wide by the bondage, and their nakedness, and the way that sign dangles obscenely from the buttplug stuck in her ass are what makes the pic powerful visually. Her athleticism and general bendiness contribute a lot to the power of the image. (House of Gord gets credit for the imaginative kinkiness of the pose.)  No way could Second Life come close to replicating that, with only my meager artistic skills to work it.

So I went with a more generic image, Junie practically naked in a submissive posture (kneeling with her legs spread wide, hands behind her back) and gagged and hooded, with gangsters in the middle ground and an urban cityscape in the background. I found me some gangster-ish images and a background image on Deposit Photos and went to Second Life and made up a Junie avatar, then made a test cover to try it out and came up with this:

I was not happy with it and not just because it was just four inches tall. I saved it at that size because that’s about the size it appears to be on the book’s view page – check it for yourself if you like. You can see the image full size by clicking on it, but you have to sell the reader with the image they see when they reach the page, not what they see if they click on the image.

The first reason I didn’t like the image was that the hands behind back kneeling pose left the avatar’s shoulders missing, or at least looking horribly deformed. I checked on some real life images of women kneeling with their hands behind their backs to see what they looked like, and what do you know, their shoulders did not vanish or look particularly deformed.

That was an easy fix, I just took another pick of the avatar standing (using a gray screen, which tends to work better for my purposes than a green screen) and grafted her shoulders back on. 

But even worse than the shoulders was the hood. Yeah, it was in keeping with story, very much so, but it just looked all kinds of wrong, especially at that four inch size, but also at full size. See what I mean?

At the four inch size, Junie's masked face is not even recognizable as human.

So I removed the hood, ring gag and posture collar from the avi and replaced it with a simple ball gag and a head of red hair and took another green screen shot with natural shoulders and pasted THAT on the kneeling Junie. Much better. 

And prior to that, I also changed Junie’s costume out because although I liked the thong bottom just fine, I didn’t like the see-through bra. It just didn’t flatter the avatar’s figure all that much. So I switched them out for the brass chains outfit which I thought did a much better job of showing off the avatar’s figure.

Finally, the background was just way too dark. The gangsters, who were basically silhouettes, got swallowed up in it, as did hooded Junie. (Redhead Junie, not so much.) So I found a lighter background that did a much better job of separating foreground, middle ground and background. And Voila! Cover art:

All it took was hours of work. A pro artist would have probably made a better cover in fifteen minutes, if only because they would not have made the mistakes I did in the first place. But also because they would probably have come up with a much better cover concept than I did in the even firster place. 

But I do recommend test covers for self-published authors who do their own covers. They let you literally see your mistakes. And thanks to this piece, gentle reader, YOU got to see my mistakes, too. Fun all around!

Oh, and as for the image that inspired the story: it did make it it into the story, in an important scene. If you read the book, you’ll know EXACTLY which scene, because I followed the inspirational art almost exactly. That, at least, I could do.

Now the question is, how do I manage to create novelettes instead of novels from these inspiring images? I’ll be working on that!

Junie Jamieson, Snoopy Reporter: Captured By Gangsters! Hardcore BDSM Rape Erotica Now On Smashwords

 

Buy it by clicking here! Full length novel just $2.99.

Hardcore rape erotica stories are selling like gangbusters on Smashwords, and who am I to argue with gangbusters? Instead I'll join in with this full length novel about a snoopy reporter who gets caught by gangsters. Here's da blurb:

When crusading reporter/blogger Junie Jamieson eavesdrops on the crime boss of Century City to get the goods on his bike path scam, she’s caught. The crime boss turns her over to his whorehouse madam Nikki Sexy, to teach Junie the consequences of snooping on important mobsters.

Nikki, whose whorehouse specializes in serving the needs of kinky customers, has all sorts of consequences planned for Junie in no time, all of them totally nonconsensual on Junie’s part. And unfortunately, the bondage skills the whorehouse staff has developed to keep submissive customers totally restrained also works to keep Junie totally restrained. She’s kept in strict bondage while her virginity is sold off as the prize in an unusual strip club contest, and she’s also bound and often gagged as she’s raped repeatedly by the whorehouse/strip club’s customers, sometimes onstage.

To make things even worse, Junie discovers a taste for submission, bondage and humiliation inside her, so that she enjoys much of what occurs to her against her every rational conviction. To make things even worse than worse, Nikki Sexy has detected Junie’s taste for submisison, bondage and humiliation and is determined to transform proud, independent Junie into her simpering love slave. And worst of all, Junie feels the pull of Nikki’s dominance, even though Junie loves to submit to the bondage of dominant men.

Will naked, bound and gagged Junie ever escape Nikki’s evil clutches and get back to the life of cycling, blogging and being a crusader that she loves? And how will her experiences change her, if she survives? And what part does Junie's deceased editor/publisher grandfather Jebediah Jameison play in all this?

This story includes a happy ever after (HEA) ... of sorts.

You’ll just have to read the story to find out. This novel is over 57,000 words long and is set in the present day.